COURSE of the MONTH

Replicate Server

We have a Dedicated server running Centos 5.x and have installed so many things over a period of time. Don't even have complete logs what was installed and any configuration changes made.
We want to copy the exact contents of this machine to another machine having different processor etc.
Is there some easy way doing it?
Both the machines are hosted with different dedicated hosting providers (unmanaged).

You should have gotten identical systems or just moved the old system over if you just want to clone.

I 2nd the virtualization call if you have no idea what you're running on your system.

Cloning might work, but if your new hardware has enough of a mismatch, the system might segfault upon boot.

rsync is good for data or when your systems are identical, but not good for running binaries and library dependencies if they're not. You could cause serious problems.

You should eventually start a new system instead of cloning old Centos5 and slowly install each package and copy the configurations over. I bet some of your packages are outdated and may have stay outdated because of old code that you no longer maintain. Keeping an old server going because you don't know what's on it is destined for major catastrophe some day.

"rpm -qa" will give you a complete list of packages installed but only the copy/cloning above will give you the config as well, however if this is a different processor inside a different network, so configuration will be different anyway